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audience had to be pacified, calmed, paid back. With a backward look he went before the curtain through the aperture at the right of the proscenium.

It was high time, too, I judged . . . a moment or two later and we would have had a riot on our hands . . . a riot composed of fifteen hundred terrified human beings fighting their way out of the building. Hundreds would undoubtedly have been killed.

I could hear Humbert’s calm, measured voice. The man had taken marvelous control of himself. He explained that Mr. Arnold had suddenly been taken ill, and that the performance could not go on. If they would stop at the box office tonight, or any time tomorrow—if they did not care to wait tonight—they could get their money back.

“Is there a doctor in the house?” he asked.

There was a silence, and then a middle-aged man arose about half way back.

“Shall I come back stage?” he asked.

“Please,” said Humbert.

In the meantime the audience was already moving toward the exits, excited, talking loudly and speculating, nerves shaken, and above all came the hysterical laughter of some woman whose nerves had finally given way.

Humbert stayed on the stage until order had finally been restored and the audience was on its way to the exits, which had been thrown wide open and yawned